


Do Not Go Gently

by DefinitelyNotStraight



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Avengers Family, BAMF Maria Hill, BAMF Natasha Romanov, Blood, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, F/F, Fluff, Lesbian Maria Hill, M/M, Magic, Maria Hill Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Nick Fury Lives, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Pagan Festivals, Pagan Gods, Paganism, Pietro Maximoff Lives, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Natasha Romanov, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 01:55:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30081702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DefinitelyNotStraight/pseuds/DefinitelyNotStraight
Summary: Elizabeth is the last Widow after SHIELD burnt it to the ground and rescued her friends.Given to Hydra, trained and made theirs with their favourite Soldier, she doesn't see a way out.Then she sees Natasha Romanov, and everything changes from there.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes & Original Female Character(s), James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Maria Hill/Natasha Romanov/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 2





	Do Not Go Gently

**Author's Note:**

> I dunno. Had an idea, will definitely never be spell checked and I'm shit at updating, but oh well.

Natasha watches as the Red Room burns to the ground. All her tormentors with it, all the children they could still save taken by SHIELD. They asked if Natasha wanted to meet them, to guide them.  
She says no, too afraid of what seeing those children with infected wounds and cold eyes would do to her. She is afraid of what those children will see when they look at her, when they notice that she has stopped aging, that her hands are stained so red with blood that she can never wash it off.  
Her choice is respected, an odd feeling for her.   
She turns away, and let's the man beside her wrap an arm around her.  
"You okay?" Fury asks her, and she leans ever so slightly into his warmth. This man is not a touchy person, but he looks at her like one would look at a daughter.  
"Let's go." She says, and he nods. They don't look back. 

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

Madame B watches from the hill as her life's work go up in flames by the hands of her most established pupil.  
Something wild and primal flares in her, something cold and burning all at once.   
She looks down to where her hand grips bruises into pale goosebumped skin.  
The child she managed to smuggle out, her last hope of a Widow.   
The girl is confused, trying to hide it but is not yet trained well enough to succeed. She does not speak, but her eyes reflect the dancing flames before them.   
She is brunette, not fire-haired like Natalia was. But she has her own allure, or she will when she grows into it. She will be taller than Natalia, but not tall enough to be seen as a threat.   
Which is exactly what she shall be.   
"What is your name, girl?" She asks, because she only bothered to learn the names of her most promised students. Now she only has one, and she will be great.   
"Katerina, Madam B." The girl says, and the woman scrunched her face up in displeasure.  
Too ordinary, too Russian. For her Widow to survive, she will need to have a universal name.  
She puts a hand in dark hair and pulls until strands come loose and the girl cries out.  
"No. Your name is not Katerina. It is Elizabeth." She hisses to the girl, who looks up with wide confused eyes, pain in her features yet still cute in that girlish way all her Widows have.   
"My name is Elizabeth." The girl whimpered, and Madam B let's go, smoothing down the hair she mussed up.  
The girl doesn't dare to flinch.  
Madame B cannot train this child, knows that her Natalia will be looking to make sure she is dead. She cannot risk her last girl being taken away.  
But that is what he is for.  
She turns to the man, the Winter Soldier, the plaything of Hydra.  
He shows nothing, wiped of everything but commands and obedience. She finds it distasteful, she likes a little resistance in her pupils. It makes them a challenge to break.  
Mind wipes are too simple.  
"Take her to your handlers. Tell them to make her a Widow, not a Soldier. They will be funded handsomely. Use any means necessary but do not damage her anywhere on her face. Do you understand?" She commands, and his dark empty eyes lock on her.  
"Yes." He says through his mask. She nods, and hands a photo to Elizabeth.   
"This is what you need to become. Your mission is to be better than Natalia." She tells the child, nails drawing thin trails of blood from her cheeks as she grips her face.  
Elizabeth nods, taking the picture in shaking fingers.   
"Be better. Or be Hydra's plaything. You have three years before I shall come to check on your progress. Do not disappoint me, girl." She warns, and the girl shakes.  
Not from the cold, because her girls have been trained out of shaking with cold.  
Fear though, fear she has not yet been broken of. But as she looks at the Soldier, she sees that she will soon.  
She shoves the girl into the flesh arm of the man, and she walks away. 

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

Three years came and went, Madam B never came. But it did not matter to Elizabeth, she was much too busy being miserable in her suffering.  
They injected her with a serum, the same as they gave their Soldier pet, and for weeks she shooks with tremors and threw up everything she ate. Even then, the already inhuman training regime they had her on continued, until Elizabeth thought she might die.  
They operated on her, as she grew into puberty, and removed the thing that made her a woman. Her ability to have children, the only thing that could matter to her more than the missions she would eventually go on.  
Now, at fourteen, she had gone on six missions with their Soldier as her retainer. She lost count of how many people she had killed.  
She debates slitting her femoral artery, she would bleed out much too quickly for them to save her. But she thinks about her picture of Natalia, her only possession, and the moments of lucidity that she sees sometimes in the Winter Soldier's eyes, and she can't bring herself to do it.  
So she trains, and she waits, and she ages.   
Madam B never comes, they tell her she is dead. Elizabeth sheds no tears nor feels any sadness.   
She doesn't remember how. 

When she is sixteen, she hears the voice for the first time, low and soft as if there was someone right next to her ear.  
It calls her sweetheart and darling, and it croons in her ear when she suffers. It promises her that someday she will kill everyone who had harmed her.   
It eases her searing hatred of Natalia, tells her of the things Natalia must have suffered just like her. Of how Natalia would save her if she knew that she existed. That Natalia works for SHIELD now, that she has made a friend called Hawkeye.  
"Who are you?" She asks, once, her only reply, into the darkness of her cell.   
*You can call me Nemesis.* The voice says sweetly, the sound wrapping around Elizabeth and soothing her to sleep. 

She stops aging at twenty.  
She is Hydra's Widow for 57 years, looking exactly the same as she did in 1965, when she stopped aging. 

In 2014, two very important things happen.  
She accompanies the Winter Soldier on a mission, and she meets Captain America. Steve Rogers, who she knows about from The Soldier's lucid moments over the years. When he remembers enough to tell her of how he used to be Bucky Barnes, and told her of the tiny little punk who had no idea when to give up. 

More importantly, she meets Natalia. Natasha Romanov, now. The Black Widow. 

Elizabeth stares as she helps Bucky (because he is Bucky, when they pull Steve Rogers to safety). Her eyes meet green ones that she knows so well, and she has to look away. 

Her orders were to kill Natalia and Captain America. Her punishment for disobeying will be severe, she may not survive it.   
But she has spent weeks watching her, watching the woman she was meant to become smile and laugh with her friend. 

She will not kill Natasha Romanov, nor will she let anyone else.  
There is a Hydra sniper, atop a building to the east, even one as trained as Natalia cannot predict it.   
Elizabeth puts a bullet in his skull before he even manages to set up the scope. 

With Bucky, who is wild and feral, half himself and half programming, she escapes.   
She urges the soldier to hide, to think on his memories.   
She let's her handlers take her.

Three weeks later, new scars across her body, her body wracking with shivers as they inject another dose of serum into her just for the amusement of seeing her shake and vomit, she hears Nemesis again.  
*you don't need to stay anymore.*  
But where would she go? How would she escape? They certainly aren't going to let her out now their Soldier can't be her handler anymore.   
The voice chuckles and fades, and Elizabeth is confused. 

The surgeons come in, and fear so old and instinctual grips her.   
They knock her out, and when she comes too, she feels heavier on her left side.  
Dread fills her as she becomes lucid. She looks down to see her arm gone, replaced with metal.  
No, no, no, no. They can't have.  
"You're going to be our new Solider." They tell her, and lead her to the chair.  
She struggles, screams and claws at them in every way she knows how to.   
She knows what this does, has seen them do it to Bucky when he becomes too lucid.   
She will not go in there. 

Something hot and dark fills her, its buzzing around her head, her heart is pounding like a drum. She does not know what it is, nor does she know why it feels so good.  
She hears a crackling sound, and she looks down to see embers. Then flames.  
Her hands itch, and her fingers are convulsing. Moving of their own accord, something yellow and misty coming from them.  
She doesn't know what it is, but her handlers seem to have seen it before because they let her go.   
But it is too late, anger that Elizabeth has squashed down for decades has resurfaced with a vengeance.  
Her hands close around one another, tucked to her chest, then she thrusts them outwards on some instinct she didn't know she had. 

Flames roar, men scream, and a sense of satisfaction fills her.  
In flames this began, and in flames it will end. 

She watches, unharmed by her outburst, as everything that had tried so hard to break her crumbles to ash. 

She walks away, and she goes to find her friend. To find Bucky. 

She has no idea what she wants to do, but she can do anything now. 

What a novel idea.


End file.
